Do Not, I Repeat, Do Not Look at That Elephant in the Room

I never cease to be amazed at man’s propensity to overlook that which is staring him in the face. Ever look for your glasses only to find them on your forehead? How about the one where you walk around the office looking for your keys only to find them in your hand, or finding out that the girl who has been your “best friend” through your last tragic relationships is actually in love with you?

There was such an “ah ha” moment yesterday at the Bay office.

Having implemented several new accounts in the past couple of weeks, it seemed like a good idea to back up the whole system on our external drive. Not being a huge office set up with an IT provider, I still have to do this manually. Needless to say it had been a while.

The hard drive had accumulated a serious amount of dust, but all 500Gigs were still there waiting to be refreshed. I booted the thing up, connected the USB cord, got all comfortable and hunkered in for my 2 hours of finding something else to do (like take a real long lunch and a walk) while it did it’s thing. One can never trust the thing to just set it up, hit go, and leave for the day. Oh no, there is always just one last prompt one forgets that will wait for ya until you show up the next morning.

So I dove in just before lunch. The thing asked me for prompt after prompt, then went blank. I repeated the processes, so did the drive. I uninstalled the software and tried to find it on the web to re-install it. Running diagnostics on the drive, a serial number and model number were produced. This didn’t check out with the numbers for an external drive, and after many troubleshooting and FAQ inquiries it seemed insurmountable so tech support was finally called in.

The next half hour was spent negotiating with the nice man in Bangalore regarding the fact that the drive was no longer supported (it was, after all, over a year old and therefore obsolete) therefore this call was not free. Next up was registering the product, which was always put off when you buy the thing because you needed it right away or you wouldn’t have bought it. The serial numbers that came up on the computer were that of an internal drive. The obvious: the internal drive on the computer happened to be manufactured by the same company. Duh.

Now the actual numbers on the external drive itself were written in some cryptic microscopic font that required literally three sets of reading glasses stacked one on top of the other so they could be read. Having entered the now correct serial numbers, and registering the product, and updated my status (paid more) as the “free trial” for the product that I had never used was now expired, we were ready to download and install the software. This took a half hour. Then the “backing up” commenced. There were no queries as to what was to be backed up, it just took off and started backing.

I checked on it dutifully for almost three hours, and was finally feeling an exhilarating triumph when it was announced “backup complete.” This exaltation was short lived when it was discovered that the offending external drive backup program that has now cost me roughly 6 hours and $50 only backed up 26G out of the 57G on the drive. Back to square one.

Then I heard that giant popping sound of my head leaving my backside.

I formatted the drive, wiping everything off of it, went to the “backup” utility that appears when the C-Drive Icon is right clicked, and hit ENTER. The entire C-Drive copied itself on my external drive just as if it were a memory stick. It took 5 mins to set up, and was there the whole time. DUH.

How many “answers” in business can you think of that were sitting on your desk the whole time?

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